


Saturn Scherzetto

by Mercurie



Category: 16th Century CE RPF, Historical RPF, Original Work
Genre: Captivity, F/F, IN SPACE!, Lesbians in Space, Marriage of Convenience, Royalty, Sexual Tension, Wordcount: 1.000-5.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-17
Updated: 2015-07-17
Packaged: 2018-04-09 01:01:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4327860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mercurie/pseuds/Mercurie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Space warlord Mary Queen of Titans has been taken captive by her arch-rival Elizabeth I of Enceladus and is faced with execution.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Saturn Scherzetto

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Eternal Scribe (Shadowcat)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shadowcat/gifts).



> Here's that space AU nobody asked for! A treat for History Exchange 2015.

First Chartley, then Fotheringhay, and now the Tower of London. Mary Queen of Titans had been transferred from one prison ship to another since she'd fallen into the clutches of the Enceladish. It was like a descent into hell: each prison more remote, secure, and silent than the last. Until now, finally, she'd come to the end of the line. After the Tower, you got transferred out an airlock into the vacuum of space. As Mary just might be if Elizabeth had decrypted those transmissions.

She wished she'd never left civilization to come to these godforsaken icy rocks. She'd been raised to be Queen of Mars, not Queen of the Titans, who never wanted her anyway. Even as the dismissive thought formed she banished it guiltily. They might be a brusque, inelegant lot, but they were her people, and she owed it to them to protect them from the Lutheran heresy, if nothing else. 

Of course, alone and cut off from the Titan and Martian fleets, she was in no position to be protecting anybody.

She heard the door whisper behind her. The cell might look like a crevice carved out of a half-melted iron ingot – this place must be hundreds of years old, truly ancient as space technology went – but the jailers took pains to make the doors as silent as possible. The better to unnerve their prisoners with, no doubt.

Mary was plenty unnerved. She kept her eyes fixed on the single porthole. You couldn't see the sun, but a slice of Saturn's rings fell within that one lonely circle. The only sign that a world besides the endless starfield existed outside her prison.

Clothing rustled, and a computerized voice announced:

"Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth I of Enceladus."

She'd intended to snub Elizabeth as long as possible, but her curiosity got the better of her. She turned around, slowly because the gravity-enhancing manacles made rapid movement impossible.

Elizabeth was a Lutheran and a bastard at that, conceived not by natural means but with non-human help. It was the kind of thing you expected to be visible – a cyborg arm, an ocular implant, even something like impossible beauty. Some sign that this woman had taken Luther's post-humanist doctrines to heart. Instead, what Mary saw was an ordinary human being; indeed, one who rather resembled herself, though dressed in the kind of finery Mary no longer possessed. Elizabeth was shorter and her red hair was a few shades lighter, she had narrower hips and obvious lean muscle, but in the end they were two unmodified human women, united in the distinction of being female princes in a world profoundly wary of them. 

The lack of any obvious grotesqueness put Mary slightly more at ease. And Elizabeth had come to see her in person. That was promising. 

"It's kind of you to visit me," she said, smiling. 

As her jailer, Elizabeth had no need to be obsequious. "We decoded your messages," she said without preliminary. "You're guilty of a conspiracy against my person. Treason."

She waited. Perhaps she hoped meaningful silence would make Mary nervous. Treason brought a death sentence. But though Mary hadn't met Elizabeth, she'd heard plenty about her. Elizabeth might put up a tough front, but she was indecisive and cautious by nature. She wouldn't be here if she'd already decided to have Mary executed. 

"I'm not your subject," she said, calm as if she were in her own throne room. "I can't be guilty of treason."

"Nevertheless, you tried to have me assassinated."

"And you set me up to be caught so you could have me executed. We're one for one, cousin."

"A rather self-serving interpretation of the situation."

"Would you do otherwise if you were in my place?" Denial, Mary thought, would do little good. She must make Elizabeth feel for her. They were similar in many ways: weak in the same places, rivals for the same realms. Deposing and executing Mary must make Elizabeth aware of her own vulnerability. 

Still, it was difficult to keep her nervousness hidden. Fear, she might rather say. The empty space on the far side of the bulkhead seemed very close. It would get closer yet if she made a misstep now. 

Elizabeth, however, didn't go on the attack. She placed slowly from side to side in front of Mary, looking her up and down rather like a prize horse. It was discomfiting to be so helpless, so restrained, and have this person with the power of life and death over her examining her and, Mary felt, finding her wanting. Captivity had stolen her strength and vigor, while Elizabeth, of course, looked every inch the queen in her white-and-gold suit. White for the Virgin Queen, as she called herself to reassure the Enceladish. 

"What else are you prepared to do?" Elizabeth said, interrupting her thoughts.

"What do you mean?" 

Elizabeth stopped her pacing. "I'm within my rights to have you executed for the crime of attempting to take my life. What are you prepared to do to avoid such a fate?"

"I..." An absurd thought flitted through her mind. What was that look in Elizabeth's eye? She became acutely aware of how much the manacles impeded her movement. Elizabeth must know exactly how hampered she was. 

Surely not. Surely not.

She licked her lips. "What are you asking me to do?"

Elizabeth's answer was neither as bad she'd feared nor as favorable as she might have hoped.

"Marry me," her captor said. 

" _What_?"

"Marry me," Elizabeth said distinctly, "and unite our realms."

"We're both women! You could never have an heir. Your people won't stand for it."

"Not so. It's possible now, given the right equipment, to create an embryo from the ova of two women."

Buried in this tomb of a prison on the dark side of Saturn, bereft of friends and allies and even sheer human company for months, Mary felt she was finally going mad. So this was her test. Elizabeth would allow her to live if she renounced her faith, if she adopted Luther's heresy that humans could – and _should_ – be made better by machines, by biotechnology, by genetic engineering; should have nanofibers built into their muscles and computer chips into their brains; should have their DNA rewritten in an endless arms race of improvement in which, inevitably, some would dominate and others would be left disastrously behind, a reification of strong and weak into self-perpetuating biotechnological castes. She could agree to that, or die. 

"Why?" she asked. She wondered, irrationally, if Elizabeth was simply tormenting her: offering her a glimpse of life that she could never ethically accept. "Why would you ask me that?!"

"Is it such a strange idea? It would solve several of our problems at once. Both of our problems." 

Mary laughed bitterly. "Yes, you'd allow me to live. That would certainly solve my most pressing problem." But the proposal was too brazen for her to dismiss it with a black joke. She had to analyze it. What did Elizabeth mean by this? "I suppose it solves the problem of the succession for you. Your subjects want an heir."

"As do yours. Neither of us has a husband or child."

"And it would reassure them that you intend to step down someday." 

The prevailing suspicion of female rulers, especially on Lutheran worlds, was that they would clone themselves and so hold onto the throne in perpetuity through their clones – shutting down the potential of anyone else ever ruling the nation. Whenever a female prince ascended, the unrest among men of royal blood was so great that she was often deposed unless she married immediately and preferably became pregnant to establish the line as soon as possible. Mary herself had heard the whispers of _tyrant_ and _despot biding her time, just you wait_ when Francis had died and she hadn't found herself a Titan as a husband quickly enough. It had contributed not a little to the loss of her powerbase on Titan. 

"You begin to see the advantages," Elizabeth said. "Titan and Enceladus are natural allies. We can unite them and cease this endless feuding."

"You mean you'll make yourself effective Queen of Titans through me," Mary said. "Why not just marry a man if you want to secure an heir? You have more than enough suitors."

"If I marry a man, he'll become King of Enceladus, and I will remain Queen. Whereas if I marry you..."

"... _you'll_ become King, and I'll be your Queen." Of course Elizabeth would be the senior partner in this plan. "You'll rule both realms, have an heir, and never have to put up with another annoying courtier telling you to marry again. Very neat."

Elizabeth smiled: a formal, chivalrous smile. "You understand me perfectly."

"And I get my life, and to be queen of two frozen moons."

"Is it so repulsive a prospect?"

For a moment, Mary imagined she saw a flicker of vulnerability in Elizabeth's eyes. Was Elizabeth trying to soften her? All the discussion had been practical, diplomacy through and through. And Elizabeth of Enceladus wasn't one to show unguarded emotion. But had she really only imagined it...?

"You ask me to give up my creed."

"On Enceladus, everyone may practice their own belief, as long as they don't try to force it on others."

"Yet you would expect me to give you an heir. That requires the Lutheran belief."

"It is but one concession, and a necessary one. Other than in the matter of the child, I'll never ask you to change your conviction."

One concession! The consequences of that concession would be momentous. Mary wondered if this was how Elizabeth always got her way: in increments small enough that it hardly seemed possible to refuse them when so much was at stake. How indeed could she refuse? Elizabeth was right about the advantages of a marriage. If the Queen had been a King, Mary would have maneuvered for it herself long ago. It wasn't a political marriage she balked at, but being party to the unnatural creation of a fatherless child.

Her conscience was as drained as her strength. She could feel the will to resist ebbing away with the trembling in her hands. She didn't want to die; not at all, not now, not gasping out her last breath in the vacuum of space. She wanted to be one of the few to leave the Tower of London alive. Besides, if she said no, she was dead, but if she said yes, she might still find a way out of this snare. She was a match for Elizabeth, Mary thought with an internal snarl, no matter how beaten she might look now.

She bowed her head. "I accept your offer."

Only the faintest tug at the corners of Elizabeth's lips revealed her pleasure. "A wise choice." She looked around the stark cell. "This place is unfit for a Queen of Enceladus. I'll see to it that you're moved to better accommodations."

"Outside the walls of a prison ship, I hope?"

This time Elizabeth did smile, a wolf's smile. "It wouldn't be the first time a queen has held her court in prison."

Mary sputtered. "You wouldn't keep me –" She regained control. "I think you're having a joke at my expense, Your Majesty."

Elizabeth laughed. "Perhaps you ought to call me 'my lord.'" She stepped close; the artifical weight of the manacles kept Mary fixed where she stood. "I would kiss your hand, my lady, but it is chained in place." And so she leaned in and, cold as only the ruler of an ice world could be, pressed a soft kiss to Mary's cheek.

Perhaps Elizabeth meant to discomfit her with this gesture, but Mary could barely hold back a smug smile. This was her territory. She had been the flower of the Martian court, and she'd been married twice already. Quick and light as a butterfly, she turned her head and kissed Elizabeth's unschooled lips. Her captor fairly leaped back and came to a wary halt what she must have considered a safe distance away. If Elizabeth had been a wolf before, now she was a wolf prowling just beyond the light of the fire, not quite daring to come close.

"I await your pleasure," Mary Queen of Titans said sweetly. And Elizabeth, without any reply, turned on her heel and stalked out, leaving Mary alone again but not, this time, counting the hours until death.


End file.
